The hate for limited jobs is unjustified

I'm not used to Sindri having the correct take and being surrounded by terrible ones, but here we are. Fitting Blue Mage into the holy trinity paradigm requires stripping it of everything that makes Blue Mage iconic in pursuit of aesthetics alone. If you'd be happier with a regular rotation caster with "spell glamours" that has no discernible mechanical identity, then more power to you, but you like boring things and represent one of the reasons class complexity has gone down over the years.

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Originally Posted by Kemiko

They're never felt any more or less powerful than any other job I could play as.

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Then you weren't taking full advantage of them. Any mainline game with an unlimited Blue Magic equivalent usually finds it somewhere near the top of the power rankings. FF5? Trades top spot with Chemist depending on version. FF7? E.Skill is generally considered the best materia. FF9? Quina is outright gamebreaking. X-2? Completely coked out and only really beaten because that game has a plethora of gamebreaking combos. Strago's just about the only mid one.

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Originally Posted by Kemiko

I brought that up as that's commonly used as the reasoning for BLU being Limited when that's never something I felt in any previous Final Fantasy game for a Blue Mage. They're never felt any more or less powerful than any other job I could play as. The most absurdly powerful of them I feel didn't even use the name Blue Mage, they used the name Mime in Final Fantasy Tactics - the whole game of skills was available to them and they still fell behind to something like Calculator.

If we can take something like Black Mage and stick them to only 3 elements when historically Black Mages had way more spells - and more powerful spells - at their disposal but no one is looking at Black Mage and claiming it needs to be made Limited to be as OP as it was in other games, I think Blue Mage can easily still retain its identify of 'monster magic/enemy skills' while still being balanced.

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When I think of blue mage I think of ff9's blue mage with the lvl 5 death spell. That's my limited exposure to the job from other FF games. Additionally it seems to me that non-trash enemies in RPGs usually get access to abilities that are more powerful in a vacuum to balance out NPC enemies being inherently more exploitable. Therefore I expect any PC that uses enemy abilities to also be more powerful. Single player RPGs also dont really have to follow a rigid balance. I am very interested however how the job balance in ff11 looks like.

I definitely do understand though when you argue using monster magic by itself is already blue mage identity.

I still don't know why Yoshi-P said the whole "powerful" thing but the main reason BLU is limited is because of the spell-hunting feature. All other jobs in the game get their abilities as they level up and a small handful are from quests. Having to hunt your spells and also having a ton of them you can switch in and out would be a nightmare for the content designers trying to balance the jobs. FFXI was a completely different game than FFXIV so comparisons don't really match here. It was the wild west back then and we had DPS jobs that were tanking, tank jobs were DPSing, and DPS jobs were also healing. The other problem I see with an "intact" BLU is people being kicked from parties for not having the right spells.

As for Beastmaster, we already knew back from 2019 that Beastmaster and Puppetmaster were going to be limited jobs if they were ever released. The devs have made it clear by example of SMN/MCH/SCH that they don't want to balance pets. No excuse for suddenly being surprised here since it's been known for 5 years now.

The alternative in order to fit BLU and BST in with the rest of the jobs would've been a greatly scaled down spell list for BLU with jobs learned at level like everything else. For BST it would probably be pets that only come out for certain abilities and disappear or attacks that are flavored to look like a crab did it. When looking between the 2 options it seems like they made the decision to appeal to job fantasy with new "limited job content" over conforming the jobs to the rest of the game.

That said, I also think that the content for BLU is not really appealing or as fleshed out as I'd like it to be and it almost feels like a project that has since been abandoned and is getting strung along. Maybe more life will be injected if they can do content with BST but time will tell.

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Originally Posted by Sindele

I'm not used to Sindri having the correct take and being surrounded by terrible ones, but here we are. Fitting Blue Mage into the holy trinity paradigm requires stripping it of everything that makes Blue Mage iconic in pursuit of aesthetics alone. If you'd be happier with a regular rotation caster with "spell glamours" that has no discernible mechanical identity, then more power to you, but you like boring things and represent one of the reasons class complexity has gone down over the years.



Then you weren't taking full advantage of them. Any mainline game with an unlimited Blue Magic equivalent usually finds it somewhere near the top of the power rankings. FF5? Trades top spot with Chemist depending on version. FF7? E.Skill is generally considered the best materia. FF9? Quina is outright gamebreaking. X-2? Completely coked out and only really beaten because that game has a plethora of gamebreaking combos. Strago's just about the only mid one.

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I'll appreciate you to not put words into my mouth in order to try to make your points.

If in order for you to have your job fantasy for your combat job to subsequently miss out on most of the combat portion of the game, well congratulations, the current iteration is exactly for you. You have it. Good job. Relish in it.

But balanced doesn't have to be boring and I do not sign to Blue Mage's identity being "overpowered job". I'll not pretend as if anything XIV has put in place is an accurate representation of any of the jobs we're used to seeing over the course of the franchises history, but at least they were playable in the content we're given.

They are just an absolute waste of Development ressources. You cant even run roulettes with them. Whats the point of them? You can never main these Jobs cause then youll be completely restricted to old content with people playing the same class.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

I am very interested however how the job balance in ff11 looks like.

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I haven't delved into XI endgame activities in a while. Most of my playtime with it was in 2004 and then again around 2008 with the Wings of the Goddess as the latest expansion and BLU had been in the game for about 2 years when I got back into it. Was it a powerful job? Yes. Did everyone and their grandmother run it for all content? No. When I played heavily, FFXI wasn't structured like XIV was and was more like, Runescape, if I had to make an off-hand comparison. More grindy, more punishing, more time consuming, more teamwork required for basic progress.

As for recently, last time I touched FFXI with any seriousness was late 2022/early 2023 where BLU wasn't used in big fights at all. There's absolutely a. . .raid structure similar to extreme and savage raids of XIV. Zone into a place, fight a thing (or several things), win, leave and get currency rewards. BLU was mostly serving as a power-leveling job, to powerful level other peoples job to 99 and farm JP. Didn't see it much outside of that. BLU was also, supposedly, the best subjob for PLD and with the correct gear, JP, skills and spells PLD/BLU - iirc - was the best tank at the time. But it was also like, marginally the best tank and for the effort and time it required, was rarely deemed worth the investment.

Mind you, this is also a game where support jobs walk into a fight, stand off in narnia, lay down their buffs and just stand around doing nothing. The life of a Geomancer in XI. Always in demand but not exactly stellar gameplay.

It is not unjustified. It is justified in a few realms.

It was advertised as a solo job, which the only solo element behind it is Masked Carnival (Edit: and gathering open-world spells).

It is also gated from a majority of the content where people would actually like to play or try it, e.g., Deep Dungeon, Field Content, and Ultimates for some. - Yes, limited job and all, but limited to this extent simply isn't it. - They've locked it from a majority of content without thinking on whether they could make distinct achievements and rewards for participating in content on the BLU counterpart, e.g., give a different title to Necromancer for completing on BLU, and Necromancer from BLU. - That would be the logical thing to do in order to compensate for how powerful the job otherwise is.

I would be happy for it to be limited, if this just means a staggered levelling process from traditional classes, and if it means it cannot simply queue up for Duty Finder, if it could actually participate in general content, albeit according to the staggered levelling.. not that it is excluded from certain content streams entirely. There needs to be compromises, there is very little for compromise. That is why I don't like it.

You need to be asking yourself why aren't people doing the hardest content with it? Is it because the content is difficult? Is it because they aren't bothered about the mount or minion rewards? Is it because the job backpedaled on what it was originally intended to be? It is because the content that they want to do with BLU, is a piece of content that they cannot do with it? E.g., Eureka, Bozja, Deep Dungeon.

People don't need to do the difficult content to hate on BLU mage, and there is a perfect reason why people hate BLU mage, the difference is that you do not like it, and/or do not agree with it. Get over it.

(Edit: You can argue on whether or not a solo job belongs in the game, but don't be surprised when some people get excited for the prospect of a solo job just to have it backpedaled because they cannot make compromises.)

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Originally Posted by Teno

The hate for it being limited is justified. You're limited to content that people don't want to do again, so nobody plays it. DoA, plain and simple. Collecting is fun for 30min and then you forget that the job exists. And not being on a 2min meta but still on a very bland gameplay gets old fast.

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Pretty much this.

BLU would be perfect for Eureka / Bozja / POTD / HOH / etc yet it's relegated to Masked Carnivale which gives useless poetics.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

It was advertised as a solo job, which the only solo element behind it is Masked Carnival (Edit: and gathering open-world spells).

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It hasn't been a solo job for 2 expansions now. The vast majority of new learned spells come from group content.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

I still don't know why Yoshi-P said the whole "powerful" thing but the main reason BLU is limited is because of the spell-hunting feature. All other jobs in the game get their abilities as they level up and a small handful are from quests. Having to hunt your spells and also having a ton of them you can switch in and out would be a nightmare for the content designers trying to balance the jobs. FFXI was a completely different game than FFXIV so comparisons don't really match here. It was the wild west back then and we had DPS jobs that were tanking, tank jobs were DPSing, and DPS jobs were also healing. The other problem I see with an "intact" BLU is people being kicked from parties for not having the right spells.

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If a Paladin signs up for a Savage pug and says, "Sorry I can't invuln this mechanic, I never bothered to unlock hallowed ground" he'd be kicked too. Conjurer wants in on an Ultimate? Better put on that stone, and if you haven't unlocked WHM you're getting the boot.

BLU is the same thing, except with the one job gimmick (and yes, it's the only gimmick BLU has consistently had in Final Fantasy history -- learning moves from enemies) added on top. Saying a person would want to play BLU but not go learn spells from enemies, the literal one and only thing BLU is known for, is asinine. That's like saying "yeah I want to play Black Mage but you know, I just don't like the whole 'magic damage' part of the job."

To top it all off, a good 75% of BLU spells are useless because they're obsoleted by other spells, and if you try to do a BLU-only Savage run... guess what, people still require you to have certain spells or you will be kicked. So all this fear of not every spell being useful or being excluded for not having them... that's what we have right now.

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Originally Posted by Kemiko

As for recently, last time I touched FFXI with any seriousness was late 2022/early 2023 where BLU wasn't used in big fights at all. There's absolutely a. . .raid structure similar to extreme and savage raids of XIV. Zone into a place, fight a thing (or several things), win, leave and get currency rewards. BLU was mostly serving as a power-leveling job, to powerful level other peoples job to 99 and farm JP. Didn't see it much outside of that. BLU was also, supposedly, the best subjob for PLD and with the correct gear, JP, skills and spells PLD/BLU - iirc - was the best tank at the time. But it was also like, marginally the best tank and for the effort and time it required, was rarely deemed worth the investment.

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Yeah blue mage seems to only be used for powerleveling and solo/party job point cleave parties and niche situations now on ff11 but did seem pretty good back in the day at least compared to its purpose now in 11.